2 Days in Siem Reap: Both Temple Days, Done Right

This is the first decision and most people get it wrong.

Two one-day passes cost USD 74. The three-day pass costs USD 62 and is valid on any three days inside a ten-day window. The three-day is cheaper than the two singles you were about to buy, and it gives you a spare day you can use or ignore.

Buy it at the Angkor Enterprise ticket office on the temple road, which is the only seller and closes at 17:30. Tickets are not sold at the temple gates. Bring your passport - they photograph you and print your face on the pass. Full detail in the pass guide.

The other consequence of the ten-day window: your two temple days do not have to be consecutive. If you are in Siem Reap for four nights, put a rest day in the middle. Two straight days on sandstone in the mid-thirties is where people stop seeing carvings and start seeing stone.

04:30 leave town. Angkor Wat opens at 05:00 and the sky colours before the sun clears the towers, so six o'clock is late. The temple faces west - alone among the great Khmer temples - which is exactly why the silhouette and the reflection in the northern pool work here. The southern pool has the same view with fewer elbows.

06:30 go inside while the crowd goes to breakfast. They leave together and the temple empties. This is the best twenty minutes of the day: the 600-metre bas-relief gallery, the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, and the upper level without a queue on the stairs. Shoulders and knees covered or you are turned back.

08:30 Angkor Thom. Enter by the south gate, causeway lined with gods and demons hauling a serpent, and give the Bayon a full hour - over 200 faces above, and markets, a cockfight and the Cham war carved at eye level below.

11:00 stop. Go back to the hotel. This is not laziness; it is what makes day two possible.

15:00 Ta Prohm, after its queue has thinned. 17:00 Pre Rup for sunset, which is better than Phnom Bakheng and has no crowd cap.

Day two is the one people remember, and it goes north-east.

Banteay Srei first, because it closes earlier than the central temples. Thirty-seven kilometres, about fifty minutes. Consecrated in AD 967, built by a brahmin rather than a king, and cut in a pink sandstone fine enough to hold detail no other Khmer temple keeps. An hour does it justice. Detail in our Banteay Srei guide.

Beng Mealea after lunch. Another forty minutes east: a 12th-century temple on Angkor Wat's footprint that was never cleared, walked on boards over collapsed galleries with trees standing in the courtyards. Between the two you see both ends of what this civilisation left - precision and collapse - in one day.

The swap, if temples are enough: spend day two on the Tonle Sap instead. The lake reverses direction twice a year and the stilt villages read completely differently depending on the month, so check the floating village guide before committing to it.

The other swap, for serious ruins people: Koh Ker, two hours north-east, capital for about twenty years in the 10th century, with a seven-tiered sandstone pyramid 36 metres high that you climb by a wooden stair. It has its own admission and almost nobody on it.

Two nights means two evenings, and defaulting to Pub Street for both is a waste of one of them.

Night one: food. A street-food walk on the first evening makes every subsequent meal better, because the barrier to eating well in Cambodia is knowing what to ask for. Fish amok, a coconut and kroeung curry steamed in a banana leaf until it sets like custard. Lok lak, beef seared hard with black pepper and a lime and Kampot pepper dipping sauce. More in the food guide.

Night two: Phare. The Cambodian circus grew out of a school in Battambang that takes children from hard backgrounds, and it is modern acrobatic theatre about Cambodian life rather than a hotel floor show. It is short, it is properly staged, and it is the thing people are still talking about on the plane.

The alternative is a classical Apsara performance. The form was rebuilt after the Khmer Rouge years from the handful of teachers who survived, and the hand positions are the same fixed vocabulary you have spent two days looking at on the temple walls. Take a ticketed performance rather than a buffet-and-show package; the food at those is reheated and the dance is an afterthought.